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To the Baltic

roughly the same cost. We had a high-level plan to go across at Dover the
France, Belgium, NL, Germany, Denmark and finish near Stockholm in Swe-
den where we could leave the boat for the winter.

On our departure day Jeremy made a call to say he was joining the Solent
from Lymington so we set off from our mooring on the Beaulieu and fol-
lowed them out into the Solent and then for 3 weeks. We generally did the
route we had planned and even got to a Sports Bar in Den Helder in time
to see my team win the Champions League Final. As
some of the channel
both of our boats had lifting keels we could stay
inside the narrow channels between the Frisian Is- markers looked a little
lands and avoid some rough water in the North Sea flimsy
although some of the channel markers looked a
little flimsy.
We parted at Speikeroog, one the East Frisian is-
lands, Jeremy headed back and we popped out into
the North Sea and sailed round to Cuxhaven and
into the Kiel Canal catching one the last tides we
would have to worry about for a few years. We then
spent the rest of June, July and August making our
way up through Denmark to Copenhagen and then
North East along the Swedish coast up to Stock-
holm.
Sailing in the Baltic is very different to what we had been used to in UK tid-
al waters. Denmark was generally flat but lots of pretty anchorages and
some small marinas, people were very friendly and general supplies were
easy to get hold of using our good old Monzo card. In fact, we didn’t have
any Danish currency for our entire visit. Sailing was easy and Navionics
charts were pretty accurate to get us along channels and local charts into
overnight stop overs interestingly we didn’t do any overnight passages for
our entire 3 months holiday. Some places we anchored were shallow and I
remember one occasion where it was difficult to get the anchor to hold in
3 meters of water and a weedy bottom. I think sailing into Copenhagen
was the highlight. It was 30C full sun and we got a berth in a relatively qui-

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